Griffin: When government officials fail us

Published 9:30 am, Tuesday, October 14, 2014

The fish with eyes positioned so low on its head that it looks upside down seems one step closer to turning the Great Lakes and their fisheries upside down.

The DNR announced last week that one water sample among 200 taken from the Kalamazoo River in southwest Lower Michigan contained eDNA, genetic evidence of silver carp, one of the species referred to as Asian carp.

You can’t even call it carp tracks; we don’t know that Asian carp have ever swum in the river, let alone become established there. It’s more like carp droppings, which could have been deposited in the river by carp, or birds that consumed carp, or boaters or anglers who moved from carpy to non-carpy waters, or...

Scientists have discovered environmental DNA, called eDNA in several locations, mainly the Lake Erie system, but now the Kalamazoo. This stuff, shed in scales, mucous or feces, identifies the source, but not how it got to where it was found.

It was one sample among 200 (with 200 more planned this week). And there have been no Asian carp discoveries or reports from the Kalamazoo. Lots of samples have been taken from Lake Erie, too, and Asian carp eDNA found there, and no live Asian carp, either. Officials warn us not to jump to conclusions, that there might be another explanation. But still...

Asian carp —specifically silver and bighead carp — are described as poised to cut a deadly swath through the Great Lakes.

(Those fisheries and ecosystems, of course, are already a mishmash of native species and newcomers — some of the latter introduced intentionally (think rainbow or steelhead trout, coho salmon, chinook salmon) and some having hitched a ride or snuck through doors we opened (think alewife, smelt, zebra mussels, quagga mussels and many more.)

After the hearings, the reports, the legislation-drafting and the court action, here’s the upshot: The people we trust and employ to take care of our business and protect our shared resources don’t seem capable of doing it.

More than a century ago engineers reversed the course of the Chicago River and engineered a Sanitary and Shipping Canal so the growing city, drawing its drinking water from Lake Michigan, could expel its wastes into the Mississippi. That linked the two systems so that ships — and creatures — could move freely from one to another.

Fisheries officials let in the Asian carp decades ago, when fish farmers in the South needed something to clean up their ponds, and the ravenous carp seemed the solution.

Politicians and engineers channeled and diked the Mississippi in ways that probably made it more likely to flood — which it did in the 1970s, inundating those fish farms and liberating their captive carp.

As the fish marched up the Mississippi system, officials, bureaucrats and citizens debated and argued about the level of risk the carp posed, the level of security provided by electrical and other kinds of barriers, and ways that security could be enhanced. Oh yeah, and who should pay for it. (We know who pays, whether in taxes or the higher costs of goods and services: we all do.)

Something of a consensus emerged: That the two systems should be restored to their separateness, (That consensus did not include, notably, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers which, congressionally directed to analyze best ways of dealing with the threat, offered seven different approaches without ranking them.) Dividing the watersheds would address this invasive species threat, and avoid others down the line.

Michigan officials joined those from other states in seeking court orders to split the systems.

A federal court shot them down.

In the Senate and House, legislation is still being drafted that would order the Corps to actually do something to block the fish.

It’s gone nowhere.

Everybody has an excuse: It’s somebody else’s fault.

Who knows how the Asian carp DNA got into the Kalamazoo? Who knows when we’ll know? Who knows what we’ll do about it if it came from live Asian carp there?

If it does signal the arrival of Asian carp into the Great Lakes, maybe ruin awaits a $7 billion fishery.

Asian carp might herald yet another abrupt change in Great Lakes fish fortunes (think: the huge alewife populations of the 1960s, the sea lamprey assault on lake trout in the 1950s, the bacterial kidney disease (BKD) attack on chinook salmon in the 1970s and 1980s, the arrival of filter-feeding zebra and quagga mussels in the late 1980s and 1990s, or any of a dozen others) from which we’ll gradually recover as the lakes adapt.

Most likely? That eventually some areas of the Great Lakes — shallower, more fertile areas such as Lake Erie, Lake St. Clair, Lake Michigan’s Green Bay and Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay (including the Saginaw and Tittabawassee rivers) — will host Asian carp that will change them as have other invaders.

What won’t change? That hollow, disappointed feeling we get when the people we’ve trusted to do a job just can’t seem to get it done.

Midland native and freelance writer Steve Griffin has covered the outdoors for the Daily News since 1975.